Abstract
As founder and director of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) at the University of Amsterdam, Professor Richard Rogers has spent more than a decade advancing digital methods and demonstrating the value of such methods for studying the web and other digital media through the development of concrete tools, research publications, educational activities and resources. In this groundbreaking and comprehensive endeavour, Rogers’ new textbook, Doing Digital Methods, expands on the seminal work of DMI on repurposing the methods of the medium to digital research itself. But most centrally, it offers a generous invitation for students and researchers to make use of DMI’s resources through a regular tour de force of the tools and types of research digital methods enable. With the book comes 1-year’s online access to an interactive Digital Methods Manual, including software tutorials on how to use the specific tools described in the book.
In line with Rogers’ previous book, Digital Methods (2013), this book aims to ground digital methods as ‘techniques for the study of societal change and cultural condition with online data’ (p. 4). Digital methods surely encompass specific tools for doing research online, but more importantly for Rogers, they are appropriate research strategies for understanding cultural and social phenomena as such. Whereas the 2013 book can be read as a programmatic statement for digital methods in social and cultural research, the present textbook aims to instruct and inspire readers to train themselves in thinking with and using digital methods for research projects. Read in full, the textbook and the accompanying online tutorials may serve as the basis of a flipped classroom-style course, with data and analysis sprints in class focused around concrete tools and themes, as modelled in the DMI summer and winter school courses, from which many of the examples discussed in the book are drawn.
The book is organized into two main parts, comprising 13 chapters in total.
The first – shorter – part, consisting of a preface and chapters 1 and 2, is dedicated to elaborating the methodological underpinnings of digital methods. Rogers explores the methodological underpinnings of digital methods as a research practice, and considers their epistemological status of the web as a source of data not just on digital culture, but on societal phenomena, thereby transcending distinctions between online and offline realities. For Rogers, digital methods offer techniques for repurposing ‘the methods of the medium’ (p. 3) to ask and answer some of the most pressing research questions of our time.
Methodological challenges of data quality, messiness, and how to ground findings are discussed, and different kinds of digital materials – digitized and born-digital–are established. Rogers then lays out the foundational steps for doing digital methods research, addressing how to design queries (e.g. building lists of URLs from which to start research about hyperlink networks), and setting up a research browser. To illustrate, Rogers demonstrates the steps by way of examples of political polarization and culture wars (e.g. in relation to elections), and the role of discursive markers of contentious politics.
The second – and considerably longer – part of the book comprises 11 chapters and roughly 200 pages, demonstrating digital methods in action. It elaborates on the relative merits and drawbacks of core tools from DMI and also includes a research tour of a host of central digital media (Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and the types of research that they invite, including a careful and knowledgeable assessment of the methodological and ethical challenges associated with their study. Each chapter in this section is dedicated to either dealing with specific tools from the DMI, research fields (Internet censorship, or doing history of and with the web) or specific services and platforms.
Chapter 3 on issue crawling offers a case in point. It explains the rationale and research opportunities associated with the Issue crawler, the perhaps most famous and most utilized digital method developed in the context of DMI. The Issue crawler maps hyperlink networks on the web, as demonstrated through the study of relationships between old and new right-wing networks in Europe. Issue crawling is based on compiling an original list of URLs (query design), a technique also used in the next chapter, on Internet censorship research. In this chapter, Rogers elegantly sketches censorship research as an activist research agenda, mapping what is censored where. He also considers the significant ethical considerations regarding risk of harm to researchers in the process of fetching URLs for this kind of research, testifying to Rogers’ own deep knowledge of and long-standing interest in understanding how censorship of various kinds may pose different risks and enable methodological tools for digital methods researchers.
The following chapters offer equally rich discussions. Chapter 5 deals with website history with the Internet Archive, chapter 6 treats Google through Rogers’ idea of ‘search as research’ (p. 107), reflecting how Google may be considered not just as a site for studying Google as a single service, but how it may also be repurposed for societal studies. The next chapters follow suit, dealing with Wikipedia, Twitter as a case of platform studies, Facebook and memes, cross-platform analysis using the so-called Klout scores as measures of engagement, tracker analysis (on the kinds of research enabled by looking at digital objects such as cookies), data journalism, and YouTube. Throughout, Rogers generously offers examples, typically from the domain of media and politics, to show the development of methodological rationales for the digital methods approach taken, the research questions that can fruitfully be pursued and the practical execution of a study with one or more digital methods tools. Each chapter ends with a proposed set of projects through which to exercise the methods. As the reader moves through the final three chapters, the approaches become more experimental and playful (especially in the case of the YouTube chapter), and the tools less well-established, perhaps testifying to new frontiers to be explored by digital methods, but also to an increasingly challenging access to data, treated by Rogers through his reflections on the development from the early DMI scraping techniques, to current reliance on APIs offered by platform owners. In the last chapter, Roger summarizes the merits of digital methods across thematical research areas and specific platforms and services.
An essential read for students and scholars keen to learn the techniques of digital methods, while retaining strong emphasis on methodological reflection, critical assessment of ontological and epistemological implications of tools and data, the book is comprehensive and exemplary in its approach and guidance on doing digital methods research.